Word: fishapod
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What really fascinates scientists about the fishapod is that it fits so neatly into one of the most exciting chapters in the history of life--when creatures that swam in seas and rivers gave rise to things that walked, ran and crept on land. The fishapod appears to be a crucial link in the long chain that over time led to amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals. Indeed, Tiktaalik roseae, the official name bestowed on the fishapod (in the language of the local Inuit, tiktaalik means "large fish in stream"), falls anatomically between the lobe-finned fish Panderichthys, found...
...will be hard to explain away the "fishapod," as Shubin and his team nicknamed their find. Unlike a true fish, it had a broad skull, a flexible neck, and eyes mounted on the top of its head like a crocodile. It also had a big, interlocking rib cage, suggesting that it had lungs and did at least part of its breathing through them, as well as a trunk strong enough to support itself in the shallows or on land. And most startling of all, when technicians dissected its pectoral fins, they found the beginnings of a tetrapod hand, complete with...
...University of Cambridge paleontologist Jennifer Clack, Acanthostega was an aquatic creature that used its limbs and lungs to make a living in water. And that scenario makes sense because it sets up conditions for natural selection--the force that powers evolution--to favor transitional life-forms like the fishapod, with its funny wrist and five digits encased in the webbing...
...discovery of Tiktaalik a pivotal moment that profoundly shifts the balance in the tension between those who accept evolution and those who question it? Probably not. Those who regard creationism as dogma will probably remain unmoved by any manner of scientific evidence. For those who are uncertain, however, the fishapod may be a source of enlightenment, a demonstration that we can recover ancient clues to events clearly predicted by the theory of evolution...
...short, fishapod adds one more brick, and an especially important one, to the edifice of Darwinian evolution-and at the same time puts the so-called theory of intelligent design into even greater question than it already faces. That would be true if only because any designer who deliberately made such a queer fish would have been more of a practical joker than anything else. But it also demonstrates that while evolution has plenty of missing bits of evidence, they keep showing up all the time to strengthen it. Evolution is, as ID supporters love to say, "just" a theory...